Don Juan (Strauss)

Last updated
Strauss in 1888, the year he composed Don Juan Der junge Richard Strauss.JPG
Strauss in 1888, the year he composed Don Juan
Excerpt from a 1992 recording by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony conducted by Dmitri Kitayenko

Don Juan, Op. 20, is a tone poem in E major for large orchestra written by the German composer Richard Strauss in 1888. The work is based on Don Juans Ende, a play derived from an unfinished 1844 retelling of the tale by poet Nikolaus Lenau after the Don Juan legend which originated in Renaissance-era Spain. [1] Strauss reprinted three excerpts from the play in his score. In Lenau's rendering, Don Juan's promiscuity springs from his determination to find the ideal woman. Despairing of ever finding her, he ultimately surrenders to melancholy and wills his own death. [1] It is singled out by Carl Dahlhaus as a "musical symbol of fin-de-siècle modernism", particularly for the "breakaway mood" of its opening bars. [2]

Contents

The premiere of Don Juan took place on 11 November 1889 in Weimar, where Strauss, then twenty-five, served as Court Kapellmeister; he conducted the orchestra of the Weimar Opera. [3] [4] The work, composed when Strauss was only twenty-four years old, became an international success and established his reputation as an important exponent of modernism. [3] Strauss often conducted the work in concerts during his long career, and the piece was part of the first recordings that he made in 1917. [4] The last time he conducted the work was in 1947 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra during his last tour outside of Germany. [3]

Although Don Juan was an undeniable triumph for Strauss, the work was not without its critics. Cosima Wagner, who was normally a supporter of Strauss and his music, despised the work because of its subject matter which did not rise to the metaphysical ideals of Wagner. [3] The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians states that "The aesthetics of Wagner and Liszt may have inspired him to embrace the extra-musical, but he refused to carry their torch for music as a sacred entity; the libertine Don (and Strauss with him) simply thumbs his nose at the world." [3]

Performances of the work last around eighteen minutes. [1] Excerpts from Don Juan are staples of professional orchestral auditions due to the numerous technical and musical demands on each instrument. [5]

Instrumentation

Don Juan is scored for an orchestra with the following instruments:

An orchestral score and a score for piano four hands was published by J. Aibl in Leipzig in 1890.

Themes, form, and analysis

Don Juan (Strauss)

The structure of Don Juan mirrors the dramatic arc of the poem Don Juans Ende by Nikolaus Lenau. [1] The music unfurls naturally as the plot divulges itself. [1] Strauss achieves this by a sophisticated merging of both rondo and sonata form principles. [3] Musicologists Bryan Gilliam and Charles Youmans described the work as containing "dazzling orchestration, sharply etched themes, novel structure and taut pacing" and being characterized by "flagrantly pictorial, humorous and altogether irreverent" music. [3]

Orchesterwerke Romantik Themen.pdf

At the beginning of the piece, Strauss uses a theme that is vigorous and spirited with the brass section making striking interjections. He moves away from this theme soon after to a solo violin playing a romance. The oboe is then heard playing a soothing melody that indicates a liaison between Don Juan and his lover. This moment is interrupted by dissonant horns, which counter with a heroic and self-assured theme. Strauss then weaves themes together in a repeated and intermingled orchestration. The work subsequently moves abruptly into a quiet melancholy which Strauss uses to illustrate the coming tragedy of Don Juan's fate. The piece ends wistfully, and not grandly, in keeping with Lenau's telling of the Don Juan tale. Don Juan, tired of running, resigns himself willingly in a duel and his life is taken by a sword wielded by his lover's father who is avenging his daughter's honor. The piece paints this picture with hushed tones like a dying breath. [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Strauss</span> German composer and conductor (1864–1949)

Richard Georg Strauss was a German composer and conductor best known for his tone poems and operas. Considered a leading composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras, he has been described as a successor of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Along with Gustav Mahler, he represents the late flowering of German Romanticism, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style.

A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source. The German term Tondichtung appears to have been first used by the composer Carl Loewe in 1828. The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt first applied the term Symphonische Dichtung to his 13 works in this vein, which commenced in 1848.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Don Juan</span> Fictional libertine

Don Juan, also known as Don Giovanni (Italian), is a legendary, fictional Spanish libertine who devotes his life to seducing women.

Program music or programmatic music is a type of instrumental art music that attempts to musically render an extramusical narrative. The narrative itself might be offered to the audience through the piece's title, or in the form of program notes, inviting imaginative correlations with the music. A well-known example is Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Reger</span> German composer, musician, conductor, and teacher (1873–1916)

Johann Baptist Joseph Maximilian Reger was a German composer, pianist, organist, conductor, and academic teacher. He worked as a concert pianist, a musical director at the Leipzig University Church, a professor at the Royal Conservatory in Leipzig, and a music director at the court of Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joachim Raff</span> German-Swiss composer and pianist (1822–1882)

Joseph Joachim Raff was a German-Swiss composer, pedagogue and pianist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Tomlinson Griffes</span> American composer (1884–1920)

Charles Tomlinson Griffes was an American composer for piano, chamber ensembles and voice. His initial works are influenced by German Romanticism, but after he relinquished the German style, his later works make him the most famous American representative of musical Impressionism, along with Charles Martin Loeffler. He was fascinated by the exotic, mysterious sound of the French Impressionists, and was compositionally much influenced by them while he was in Europe. He also studied the work of contemporary Russian composers such as Scriabin, whose influence is also apparent in his use of synthetic scales.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Siegfried Wagner</span> German composer and conductor

Siegfried Helferich Richard Wagner was a German composer and conductor, the son of Richard Wagner. He was an opera composer and the artistic director of the Bayreuth Festival from 1908 to 1930.

<i>Death and Transfiguration</i> Tone poem by Richard Strauss

Death and Transfiguration, Op. 24, is a tone poem for orchestra by Richard Strauss. Strauss began composition in the late summer of 1888 and completed the work on 18 November 1889. The work is dedicated to the composer's friend Friedrich Rosch.

An Alpine Symphony, Op. 64, is a tone poem for large orchestra written by German composer Richard Strauss in 1915. It is one of Strauss's largest non-operatic works; the score calls for about 125 players and a typical performance usually lasts around 50 minutes. The program of An Alpine Symphony depicts the experiences of eleven hours spent climbing an Alpine mountain.

<i>Ein Heldenleben</i> Symphonic poem by Richard Strauss

Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40, is a tone poem by Richard Strauss. The work was completed in 1898. It was his eighth work in the genre, and exceeded any of its predecessors in its orchestral demands. Generally agreed to be autobiographical in nature despite contradictory statements on the matter by the composer, the work contains more than thirty quotations from Strauss's earlier works, including Also sprach Zarathustra, Till Eulenspiegel, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Death and Transfiguration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henri Rabaud</span> French conductor, composer and pedagogue (1873–1949)

Henri Benjamin Rabaud was a French conductor, composer and pedagogue, who held important posts in the French musical establishment and upheld mainly conservative trends in French music in the first half of the twentieth century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Symphonic poems (Liszt)</span> Group of 13 orchestral works

The symphonic poems of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt are a series of 13 orchestral works, numbered S.95–107. The first 12 were composed between 1848 and 1858 ; the last, Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe, followed in 1882. These works helped establish the genre of orchestral program music—compositions written to illustrate an extra-musical plan derived from a play, poem, painting or work of nature. They inspired the symphonic poems of Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, Richard Strauss and others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tone poems (Strauss)</span>

The tone poems of Richard Strauss are noted as the high point of program music in the latter part of the 19th century, extending its boundaries and taking the concept of realism in music to an unprecedented level. In these works, he widened the expressive range of music while depicting subjects many times thought unsuitable for musical depiction. As Hugh MacDonald points out in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "In the years prior to World War I these works were held to be in the vanguard of modernism."

<i>Macbeth</i> (Strauss) 1886–1888 symphonic poem by Richard Strauss

Macbeth, Op. 23, is a symphonic poem written by Richard Strauss between 1886 and 1888. The work was his first tone poem, which Strauss described as "a completely new path" for him compositionally. Written in some semblance of sonata form, the piece was revised more thoroughly than any of Strauss's other works; these revisions, focused primarily on the development and recapitulation sections, show how much the composer was struggling at this point in his career to balance narrative content with musical form. Bryan Gilliam writes in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians that, "New path or not, Macbeth failed to find a firm place in the concert repertory, because it lacked the thematic cogency and convincing pacing of musical events so evident in the two antecedent works [Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung ]. And despite revisions to the orchestration, in an attempt to restrain inner voices and highlight principal themes, Macbeth still falls short of Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung in sonic clarity."

Friedrich Klose was a German composer. He studied with Vinzenz Lachner in Karlsruhe, and then with Anton Bruckner in Vienna, and recorded his impressions of his time with Bruckner in a book. His Mass in d-minor was written in response to Franz Liszt's death. His opera Ilsebill (1903) is inspired by the music of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, and the plot is based on the Brothers Grimm tale of a fisherman who catches a huge fish which grants ever increasingly more greedy wishes and this is reflected in the increasing complexity of orchestration during the opera. It was premiered in 1903 in Karlsruhe under the direction of Felix Mottl. He ended his career as a composer and a teacher in 1919 and retired to Switzerland.

In 1882–3 Richard Strauss wrote his Horn Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 11, in two versions, one for piano accompaniment and one with an orchestra. The horn concerto has become the most frequently performed horn concerto written in the 19th century. The premiere with piano accompaniment was given in 1883 at Munich, and that with orchestral accompaniment in 1885 at Meiningen.

<i>Utan svafvel och fosfor</i>

Utan svafvel och fosfor is an a cappella work for male voice choir, written by Richard Strauss in 1889. It sets the words found on a Swedish matchbox.

<i>New Years Eve Concert 1992: Richard Strauss Gala</i> German TV series or program

New Year's Eve Concert 1992: Richard Strauss Gala was a 76-minute televised event presented in Berlin's Philharmonie on 31 December 1992, in which four pieces of music by Richard Strauss were performed by the pianist Martha Argerich and the singers Kathleen Battle, Renée Fleming, Andreas Schmidt and Frederica von Stade with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Claudio Abbado. It was jointly produced by Columbia Artists Management and Germany's Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen in association with France's La Sept, Japan's NHK and the United States' PBS, and was released on CD and Laserdisc by Sony Classical Records and on DVD by Kultur Video.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Piano Quartet (Strauss)</span>

The Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 13, TrV 137, was written by Richard Strauss from 1884 to 1885. An early chamber music work of the then 20-year-old composer, it shows considerable influence from Johannes Brahms. It is scored for a standard piano quartet consisting of a piano, violin, viola, and cello. At the premiere on 8 December 1885 in Weimar, Strauss himself performed the piano part.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Heninger, Barbara. "Program notes for Redwood Symphony". Archived from the original on 19 October 2014. Retrieved 9 March 2014.
  2. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, translated by J. Bradford Robinson (California Studies in 19th-Century Music 5) (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1989): 331, 334. ISBN   978-0-520-07644-0.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
  4. 1 2 3 Betsy Schwarm. "Don Juan, Op. 20, tone poem by Strauss". Encyclopædia Britannica .
  5. Andrew Clements (May 29, 2014). "Strauss: Also Sprach Zarathustra; Don Juan; Till Eulenspiegel review – a showcase for CBSO's superb playing". The Guardian .